The Battle Against Free Love: Literature and Journalism about Romance in Di Varheit During World War I

• In Event: New Approaches to the Yiddish Press in the Americas

Abstract

Miriam Karpilov’s novel Diary of a Lonely Girl or The Battle Against Free Love, which was first published serially in the Yiddish daily Di Varhayt in 1915-1918, and later appeared in book form, offers a raw, intimate, personal criticism of radical leftist New York Jewish society’s complicity in a young woman’s vulnerability and desperate circumstances as a participant in a culture of free love in which she is used, undervalued, and discarded. The novel reveals a psychological portrait of a young woman trying to understand herself as independent and modern while she is still desperately dependant on a man for companionship and affirmation.

Karpilov’s novel adopts the conventions of Yiddish popular fiction, including flowery Germanicized language and a plot heavy with love and romance, but it also contains elements of sophisticated modern fiction, including notions of multiple and complicated relationships with the self. Positioned at the end of the newspaper, next to theater reviews and dieting suggestions, it appears to be frivolous fiction, but it also contains radical political statements about gender and women’s self-ownership. It was seen at its time as an emblematically modern piece of writing, not only because, as Norma Fain Pratt has noted, in Yiddish newspapers, the mere act of printing fiction by women in and of itself could serve as “a symbol of modernity,” but also because the subject matter of the sexually liberated young woman was so shockingly controversial.

This paper seeks to situate Karpilov’s serialized novel within the framework of the newspaper, examining journalism and fiction in the paper in the years in which it was written that shares similar themes of free love, birth control, and changing gender roles. It also considers the novel in the broader context of the work of the newspaper during the turbulent years of World War One. The paper examines the extent to which serialized entertainment fiction stands alone, and whether and how it participates in the political and literary aspirations of the newspaper more broadly.

Author

• Jessica Anne Kirzane, University of Kansas